


If you prick me...

by prospitianknightmares



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, i don't like generations very much.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:33:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25944415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prospitianknightmares/pseuds/prospitianknightmares
Summary: Perhaps to be human is to live much of one's life in retrospect.
Relationships: Data & Lal (Star Trek), Data & Noonian Soong
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	If you prick me...

**Author's Note:**

> hello, NCEA. i see you're checking to see if my creative writing folio short story was plagiarized. fear not. Rachael (lastname) did, in fact, write this. yes, i wrote star trek fanfiction expressing my dissatisfaction with data's arc for my english class. fear me. i had to trim it down bc wordcount limits but a bit more is on the way baby!

Data’s positronic brain was designed to physically mimic the mechanisms of the human mind, but Dr Soong had made the mistake of installing him with superhuman thought. Perhaps there was some fundamental error in his design that held him from experiencing what his peers took for granted. He was a digital mind in an analogue body. 

Data felt no fatigue, so he could not rightly compare what he was experiencing to insomnia. But it was similar. Around this time his dream program should have been in progress, but tonight he had simply gone through the motions, lay down and let his thoughts wander past the point he would normally remain functional. 

His eyes kept on darting toward the Emotion Chip on his bedside table and back to the ceiling. It was suspended in mid-air in a sealed glass phial, like an elixer. Drink me. 

These were the facts: He knew he could not experience fear, try as he might to replicate it. He stood up and watched the silicon-cast likeness of Soong, his inherited face, smile back at him through the mirror, and some part of him identified the expression as hollow. Data had no natural intuition, so he wondered how he could tell. 

He had a memory of what it was to feel, but the part that would have frustrated him if he had the capacity for it was that the memories must have been altered in their transfer from Lal’s mind to his own. He compared her thought patterns to his own and found no discrepancy- but there had to be some difference in how her neural network functioned. He knew fear a fluttering in your stomach, a cold sweat, pacing and hair-plucking and a wavering voice. It was Lal in her last moments alive, the way she jabbed at her chest and repeated I feel, I feel, I feel... it was a set of behaviours he simply could not produce. 

So it was an error in recollection. Analogue thoughts to a digital mind. 

He was not afraid as he punched in the code to unseal the chip, and he was not afraid as he peeled back the synthetic skin at the nape of his neck: his hands were perfectly stable, and his pupils hadn’t so much as dilated. There was a small indentation, moulded to the shape of it, toward the back of his uppermost vertebra. Before encountering his father he had wondered why it was there. 

The process would have been easier if he had a second pair of hands with him, but it was late. He slid the chip into place and- 

He was standing before Maddox seven years as a clutched a copy of sonnet 29, sneering: are these just words to you, or do you fathom the meaning? And he could think of nothing to say, because he wasn’t sure himself. At the trial, every ‘it’ had stung like salt on a wound. 

And he was underground on Terlina III, apologising as Dr Soong wilted in his arms. He could not mourn him properly. You will, he reassured him, in your own way; and for the next few years he could not see his reflection as his own. 

And he was beside Lal in the repair chamber, marionette-string wires running from her body to the ceiling. The monitor lights blinked in and out like stars, and all he can think to say when her eyes went dim was I wish I could feel it with you. 

He checked the mirror. His expression hadn’t changed. There was substance behind it, but it hadn’t changed. In the span of a second, thirty-four years of feeling overwhelmed his positrons to the point he thought he may short-circuit. This could be the end of me, he thought. 

It was not. 

“Intriguing”, he said to nobody in particular. 

Data decided against activating his dream program. Instead, he returned to a half-finished painting of Spot, reclined against a starry landscape. He hummed to himself in the dead of night, because he felt like it. 

“...I'd be tender, I'd be gentle, and awful sentimental, regarding love and art... hm-hm-hmmm hm-hm-hm-hm, hm-hmmm, hm-hm-hm-hm, if I only had a heart...”


End file.
